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History - Articles Issues Suburban Sprawl or New Urbanism and Gentrification |
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The history of why I moved to Boston.
I consider this area home. Even though I grew up in the other coast, and went to school on the west coast. Usually people move out here for school, and sometimes they even stay. Although a lot of Californians eventually do move back
There is no particular singular reason, why I moved out here. Although I could talk about trying to leave an uncertain relationship, or because of a woman, good job prospects, or a host of other things. The real reason is that there wasn't much of a reason. Mostly out of instinct I thought. Just something to do, and looking back at it I didn’t know a bit about what I was doing.
I had graduated from college, and thought I had a pretty bulletproof resume. I had worked at Intel as a co-op, and had pretty good interest during the college job hunting process. Secondly I’d worked for a summer at Micron technology.
Even by that time I’d realized that getting a job, depended on luck and fortuitous situations. As everyone would say… Networking. The contacts from your first job lead to the second job, which keep on leading to other opportunities. The proverbial, "If I could only get my foot in the door."
My first job, Intel.
In the spring of 1994, I’d felt like I got my first real job. And I learned all about those other things. Intel had happened to need a co-op engineer in their advanced projects group. This was an entry level position for a college undergraduate. It was research oriented, and exposed me to the field, I was somewhat self independent, and I found things for me to do. I was in charge of running a SEM, trying to evaluate cross sectioning techniques, and metal deposition techniques. In a sense, it could have been a lot better job than I thought. Because they had an amazing set of measurement tools which looking back it really must have been an exhaulted place.
Timesheets, overtime, tax withholding, time and a half. I was making $13 an hour, the internet hadn’t happened yet, e-mail was transitioning from the days of Unix, and VMS mail, to Lotus cc:Mail. PC's were just about in the
Boise Idaho. '95
I hadn’t even known where it really was, when I first got a call inviting me to interview and work up there. I was excited about it and it was a bit of an adventure. Once I’d gotten the job, my father had agreed to let me use his car and we drove up there together. We packed up my car, a small hatchback Celica. Drove for a day to Reno, then the next day drove to Boise. The hatchback was filled almost completely with stuff.
The summer was rather eye opening, I was 21. And it was one of those crazy adventures, which you tell stories about.
I shot my first gun, a 22 caliber rifle.
This was the summer I started drinking, cheap beer too.
I went white water rafting, and took a class in white water kayaking, although
Went to Sun Valley Idaho, biked a bit, met a lot of interesting people
I’d diven up there, and realized that there was a whole world to explore outside of California. I'd only flown on three or four trips in my lifetime. and probably only once really been out of state.
Moving to Massachusetts
I flew out here, with a few boxes, This is the woman who picked me up at the airport, even though I’d rented a car. We drove back up to her humble apartment in Manchester NH. I find it odd, that this relationship of all things should have been the sketchiest thing one could imagine, and even now. With all that my friends know about me, there’d be some suspicion. But it wasn’t. But she simply opened her home to a friend trying to get settled in a new place.
She was my ex-girlfriend from high school. Back then we had a childish relationship, never getting much past holding hands. and a year before had graduated from UCSD, with a major in Math. She would later go on to get a masters degree. She was married to a man in the air force, who had been temporarily sent overseas to work somewhere for a few months. It should have been questionable, her kid brother was living there and I stayed on her sofa every morning.
I asked if I could stay with her for a few weeks. And maybe without having
to consider it, she simply accepted. It was
As it happened those few weeks turned into three weeks, before I would
move into my first real apartment.
At the apartment I would purchase two things. A set of dressers (of which I don’t know what happened to the dressers, but I still do have the armoire, in my garage storing my tools and such. But I’d purchased a queen sized bed for 200, and well looking back at that it was probably the most comfortable thing I’d ever owned, and thinking about it I should have kept it instead of selling it maybe six months later for a little over a hundred dollars.
But you still haven't answered the question... Why?
But why did I move here? Why did I leave silicon valley? Why did I leave San Francisco? Would I have been happier?
Would I have bought the house, would I have become so active in the community. I wonder, I wonder, if I would have continued to hang around with Carl, and Celia… And somehow become part of New Hope…
May 31, 2007